The Exorcism
It was 4am when she started calling for me. I heard her in my dream first.
‘Louis!’
I fell off the sofa, scrambled for a shirt, yanked it over my head while leaving the room. When I creaked open the living room door, I winced at soft lamplight.
That smart bulb that was knackered. The one she told me about when I first came to visit her. Working again, apparently.
‘I need to sit up,’ she said, too weak to look up at me. I shuffled the walker frame away from the bed, put my hand around her forearm. My middle finger and thumb met as I pulled her upright.
She leaned forward, head hovering over the duvet.
‘I feel really sick,’ she muttered.
I fumbled blearily for the ant-sickness medication and filled the plastic syringe. She didn’t say anything, just propped the tip into her mouth and pushed.
‘Thank you,’ she offered meekly. She sat almost curled over, bony elbow on the knee under the thick duvet, fingers running through her hair gently. Even in the dim light I could see how purplish they were.
They’ve always been such cold fingers. When I was little, she complained about bad circulation that made them so icy. But when I was sick and lying in bed, feverish and queasy, waking up to that chilly smoky palm pressing on my forehead was such a comfort.
I settled her as best I could. She seemed to be nodding off in that curled over position, not responding to my queries around whether she wanted to, you know, be moved from that curled over position, so I went back to the squishy old sofa in the next room.
Maybe twenty minutes later, I heard her calling in my dream again.
‘Louis!’
Again I bundled through the living room door. She was still hunched over.
‘I can’t get comfy,’ my mother told me, from possibly the most uncomfortable-looking pose ever.
Again, I moved the walker aside, and shuffled the little table with her phone and half-drank cups on it. After I helped her decide what buttons to press to make the bed be where she wanted it, I squatted down and looped my arms under hers to pull her back up the mattress.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘that’s lovely’.
Shortly after I was woken by another call.
‘Louis!’
We didn’t need the smart bulb turned on this time. The first slips of morning sun were poking through the curtain rails.
‘I can’t get comfy,’ she said, ‘I’m not right.’
Again, I shuffled the walker away from the bed.
All the way till quarter to nine in the morning, I was roused from almost sleep by my dying mother at regular intervals. She was restless, a little agitated, couldn’t find the right position to rest in. Sometimes she wanted to be sat up and left alone, then helped to lay back down.
‘What part of you is uncomfy?’ I asked, exhausted.
She paused for a moment, before replying:
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’
It wasn’t her fault. It’s a symptom of the disease, near the end.
‘I never thought I’d end up like this,’ she said grimly.
I didn’t know what to do. I pulled the little table away from the bed, slipped in-between, and stroked her back for a while.
Ribs. Just ribs. No muscle, barely a layer of skin. It was like running my fingers along a fence.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ I told her. And I meant it.
There was a long, long pause. I wondered if I had overstepped. I think the last time the woman and I had touched was the last time she held my hand as a child.
‘Thank you,’ she replied eventually.
Later, the two visiting Macmillan carers saw how shattered I was, and told me to go for a nap while they helped my mother with her pant pads. She wanted a wash and freshen up. I ran some hot and cold water into a plastic basin and took it into the living room.
I tried not to look at what was happening on the bed.
Why was I doing this? The principle? Some sense of moral superiority?
I thought about it, lying on the sofa again after the carers left. I thought it might be because I would want my children to do the same for me. But then, I wouldn’t have cut my children off for more than a decade to protect my partner, who during that time would become a husband. And I wouldn’t have left the glaring symptoms of cancer for six years before finally getting care.
But that’s me, and that’s my mother. Two people who don’t knew each other at all.
She seemed to rest easier in the day, though not by much. She didn’t ask for food, and her rest was fitful.
My mind was in turmoil. The flashbacks haunted me, but seeing her so sad was making me sad too.
I called the palliative care nurse to ask after an injection that would help mum settle. A sedative; there was a bag of them and a few other preparatory medications, sitting on the dusty hi-fi system in the living room. They weren’t to be administered by anyone other than a nurse, though.
The lady on the phone said she would ask the carers if my mum was ready for them yet. She would call back.
At one point, I went outside to tidy up my car. I left mum listening to her too loud York Mix FM and leafing at a newspaper. She wasn’t taking in the words, just looking at the pictures.
I rang Dad.
‘Dad,’ I began, then the emotions poured out.
‘Oh, love,’ Dad said. ‘What’s up?’
I could barely talk for sobbing. I’d been awake 24 hours but for maybe ten- or 20-minutes sleep, and was looking after a woman who I did not know how to communicate with.
I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to say it to mum. I wanted to say it to Mum – the woman she was before the incident nearly thirty years ago.
That woman who wore bright blush and red lippy. That woman who would stride in to town wearing stiletto heels and low-cut top while pushing my little brother, D, in his pram. That woman had a laugh that sounded like ice cubes jingling in a glass, and a smile like a slip of sunlight emerging from the edge of an eclipse.
She was in there somewhere, Mum. I hadn’t seen her for nearly 15 years, but she’d peeked from mum’s body many a time in the years before. When she wiped away tears while I sang her opera tunes, when she dragged D and I out shopping and we got little tins of Power Rangers lemonade from Woolworths. I used to hang over the banister at night, straining to hear her excitedly tell her partner about the new chapter of the book 12-year-old me had written.
The woman on the bed in that house was mum. Not Mum. She was that crochety, guarded woman who didn’t care about anyone, especially not herself.
While I was blubbing on the phone to Dad, I got a call from mum. I ended my call and bundled inside.
‘Someone’s just called me,’ she said. ‘Wanting to know about me being in pain?’
I grimaced. For some reason, the palliative care worker I’d talked to on the phone rang mum rather than me. So now she was confused, because it wasn’t pain she was in. And she really didn’t like me trying to arrange things without telling her.
I thought about saving her sense of pride. But then I thought: fuck it.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘They weren’t supposed to call you, obviously. I was asking about maybe getting you something so you can settle down a bit. I know you’re not in pain.’
‘Well I’m not in pain,’ mum snipped.
‘I know,’ I replied. I knew she was lying, but that’s always been her. For some reason, she’d stay suffering and get pissy at people for pointing out that suffering.
I couldn’t help it. I started crying. I felt like a child again, I couldn’t control it.
She looked at me properly. I swear I saw it – I saw Mum show up behind those eyes. It was like she became a different person.
‘What’s the matter?’ She asked, genuinely concerned.
I couldn’t talk for a moment. I was choking on sobs and sniffling too much. Then I said what I’d wanted to for the last decade and half.
‘I missed you so much,’ I sobbed.
Her face softened. Her eyebrows raised, maybe surprised? For a moment I wondered if the usual mum would shake me off like she always used to.
‘I missed you too, love,’ My Mum replied, her voice full of emotion. ‘I really did, love.’
‘Then why this?’ I banged my palm on the end of the bed, ‘Why have you not talked to me for this long?’
‘I don’t know, love,’ She really sounded like she meant it. There were tears pooling in her eyes. Then, after a long pause: ‘Has the last ten or ‘summat years really been that hard for you?’
I thought about the rape by a co-worker. Then the one from a boyfriend. The year I spent drinking two bottles of wine a night. The man in London who coerced me into his car and assaulted me. The times I called her home number and no one answered. The suicide attempt, the days and weeks and months wasted festering in a deep pit of depression and spending so long in bed I started to develop sores.
‘Yes,’ I managed. ‘Because…the PTSD.’
She stared at me. It was Mum. She was devastated.
‘I so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
I knew what she was apologising for. She was apologising for her partner, how now-husband: The Man Who Is Not My Father.
‘I forgive you Mum,’ I sobbed.
‘Do you?’
‘I do, Mum. I would have before; we could have worked through it. So many times in my life I’ve needed you. I would have done anything.’
‘I know love, I really am so sorry.’
We started to talk. Actually, properly talk. About how life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, how we all make decisions we think are right at the time.
I told her about my first relationship, how it was abusive. Mum had actually met him a good many times, it was before the near fifteen-year silence.
‘I knew he was,’ she muttered with anger. ‘I could tell he was.’
‘He only hit me once,’ I reassured her. ‘But it was the psychological abuse.’
She nodded sagely. She understood exactly.
‘Because,’ I continued, ‘I think it was Dad who told me, J’s father was like that.’
J is my half-brother. He was nearly 9 when I was born, I think.
The old mum would have been pissed off that I knew about her first marriage. She would have shut down any conversation around it.
But this Mum, this dying woman, nodded solemnly.
‘Yeah,’ she said. Then, ‘Yeah’, in a tone hanging with the weight of PTSD.
Mum was 19 when she gave birth to her first husband’s child. That man was, to be frank, a piece of shit. Off the bat, too – because he was almost forty with a family of his own.
He saw a vulnerable young woman with low self-esteem and he preyed on her. And he beat her. And he stopped her having friends, he wouldn’t let her get a job, he would make her beg for money to buy nappies for his baby.
‘This is what they do,’ I interjected when she started looking a bit angry at her teenage self, ‘they make you feel like you have to rely on them.’
‘Yep,’ she asserted.
‘And that without them, you are nothing. That’s how they control you.’
‘Yep!’ She said it louder this time. Way louder than I expected to hear from such a frail frame.
This was the first time she ever talked to me about this guy. I felt kind of privileged. The parallels between her first relationship and mine were frightening. I was lucky to get out of mine without a baby, but she stayed for J. Until one day, when J was about 6, she waited for her then-husband to go to work, bundled as much of her things together, took J’s hand and ran.
‘I had to,’ she told me, holding her little teddy bear now. ‘He had got violent. Really, really violent. I had to protect J. I had to do it.’
I was so proud of her for telling me. I knew this was the first time she was opening up about the trauma. It made me angry at that man, it made me wish I had been there to protect her.
Then we got talking about One Foot In The Grave. How Victor Meldrew seems more relatable the older you get. That episode in the car when Victor puts in a cassette tape to hear car mechanics singing a lament about him.
And my master’s degree from Cambridge, which I was awarded a couple of years ago. She grinned widely. And it’s a distinction, the highest grade!
Too weak to clap, she pressed her thumb and forefingers together a few times. So cute.
And her sailing adventures. How she and The Man Who Is Not My Father navigated a force nine gale around the coast of Wales on their little yacht, how the pair of them were so well-tuned they didn’t need to communicate while pulling the ropes and unfurling sails.
‘Sounds like you were really in sync,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘The others at the marina would watch us in awe, casting off not saying a word to each other.’
I realised then – she had forgiven him for what he had done. And she loved him.
And I didn’t hate her for that. I liked seeing her smiling.
She asked me to move her maybe every twenty to forty minutes up to the carer’s final visit of the day, at 9pm. She was softer in her tone. Every time I went to move her, Mum looked at me and asked ‘are you okay, love?’
After the carers changed her and got her comfy, I asked the one who was a nurse to administer the sedatives.
‘She’s really restless,’ I insisted, ‘She can’t get comfy.’
‘I understand,’ the nurse replied clinically, ‘but we can’t give the sedative unless we see evidence that it’s needed.’
‘Yes, but when people visit, she gets a bit chatty. Then when you go, she’s calling for me every ten minutes because she can’t get comfy.’
‘I understand it’s hard,’ the nurse continued, ‘but we would need to see her shuffling, saying she doesn’t know what she wants- ‘
‘She says that constantly,’ I interjected. ‘That she doesn’t know what she wants.’
‘Okay, but we need to see it.’
‘Well, if I call the district nurse tonight, are you saying when they come over and she’s not literally saying she doesn’t know what she wants and shuffling like she has all day, they won’t give the sedative so she can finally sleep? I mean you can see she’s exhausted.’
‘They will assess her,’ the nurse replied.
I was getting frustrated, so I thanked her and let her get on.
‘Would it help if your table is taller?’
I was trying anything I could think of. Since she ‘didn’t know what she wanted’, it was a tough call. But her drink of water and phone and sippy cup being on a table shorter than the bed certainly wasn’t helping given how low energy.
‘Maybe,’ mum said, grouchily.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I leaned towards her conspiratorially, ‘what if we replace this table here with that bedside table you’ve got upstairs? Then you can reach things easier on your own.’
‘Aye, yeah.’ A pause. ‘But we need to wait for D to come over and bring it down.’
‘Er, Why?’
‘Well ‘cos he can carry it down fine.’
‘Mum, I’m pretty sure I can carry a bedside table.’
‘It’s very heavy.’
‘Is it though?’
‘Well you can try if you blummin’ well want.’ Ah yes, that snippy tone I remember so well.
I went upstairs. After five minutes of trying to shuffle a heavy table with drawers full of gubbins, I came back down.
‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘We need to wait for D.’
Mum’s knowing, smug look was filled with such cheekiness, it was adorable.
Later when D came over for a short check-in, Mum sent him upstairs (although not before relaying the story of me asserting I could get the bedside table down myself). He made a big show of carrying it on his shoulder like a lumberjack.
‘Friggin’ prick,’ I muttered.
She was so pleased with how much easier it was to reach her things. ‘Dead chuffed’, as she would put it.
‘Good job you’ve got a strong son,’ D said, flexing his arms in my direction.
‘Oh, piss off,’ I muttered. Mum was hunched over and rubbing her forehead again, but she was smiling.
From midnight onwards, she called me in to her dark room to move her around. Sometimes she wanted sitting up, sometimes she just ‘didn’t feel right.’
Eventually at about 4am she admitted it.
‘I’m sorry, but I’m in agony here,’ Her voice roused me from a very shallow slumber. ‘Louis!’
She’d not mentioned pain before. I put two and two together: she had been waiting out this entire time not admitting the pain she was in. Because that’s what she always did.
I could see in the half-light that she had kicked her blankets down, and was slouched with her knees up, gently squirming.
‘Okay,’ I put my hand on her knee, ‘On a scale of one to ten, ten being childbirth, what pain are we talking here?’
‘A seven, or an eight,’ she grimaced.
Oh shit. Okay. Right.
I called the district nurse, practically begging for them to come help with her pain and restlessness. A half hour later, two women bundled in and prepared injections.
‘Am I okay to put the injection in your leg?’ the especially clinical one asked.
‘I don’t care, wherever.’ Mum really was in pain.
She calmed down quickly. After they left, I put my hands under her bony arms to drag her further up the bed, then messed with the bed controls till we found the position she was comfiest.
‘Are you okay?’ She asked blearily.
‘You’re a pillock,’ I said. ‘You should just say when you’re in pain, don’t try to hide it.’
‘I know,’ she muttered. ‘But I’ve got to be strong.’
‘No, you’ve got to stop being a pillock.’
She smiled a little.
‘It’s hard,’ she mumbled, ‘I’ve been a pillock all my life.’
Pillock is a Yorkshire term. It means idiot.
Mum slept soundly for about an hour before she woke up and called for me. In the interim I got no sleep.
I called the district nurse again. She wasn’t able to come over until about 7.30am. In the meantime, I rearranged my mother best I could. She was restless, her skin was going grey.
When the district nurse finally arrived, she agreed Mum needed a higher dose of the sedative and more painkiller too. She said Mum looked ‘very, very poorly.’
Mum settled after the injections. I watched from the end of the bed as her eyelids drooped, head relaxed back into the pillow. The poor thing finally fell into a deep sleep.
The district nurse took me back into the kitchen, where she wrote her notes and arranged the medicines.
‘I saw this form,’ she said, pushing a grey photocopy to me, ‘that your mum hasn’t filled out. We really need to know what her choice is.’
I glanced over the unfilled print boxes. It was a Do Not Resuscitate order, to be signed by the palliative party.
‘Oh. Yeah, My brother and my aunt have been trying to get her to sign this, but she won’t.’
‘She wants to be resuscitated?’
‘Well, no…it’s just how she is. She puts thing off as long as she can. She kept saying “I’ll have a think and sign it later.”’
Imagine having to a sign a form that practically says “let me die when I die”. The shattering sense of mortality. Especially given that mum is only sixty-six, with estranged children still to reconcile with. My half-brother, J, still waiting for her to let him call.
‘Well, given how she is,’ the nurse said kindly, ‘we can have a GP allow the DNR on her behalf, after an assessment of her health. I can sort a GP out to call you this morning if that’s okay?’
‘Yes please,’ I nodded. Honestly, despite the anguish she has caused me and how often I blamed her for the ruin of my life, I cannot stomach the idea of her continuing to live in the state she is, with the added pain of a crushed ribcage after the thuds of chest compressions.
I called D and my aunt for their opinion. They agreed. So when the GP called me, waking me from another slight sleep, I put a Do Not Resuscitate order on my own mother.
Despite being awake nearly two days, I stood at the door of the living room and watched her sleep. Her breaths were steady, deep. She looked peaceful. It was such a relief to see her relaxed, I cried.
My phone chirped. A message from my brother, D.
“You’re doing so well. I’m really proud of you x”
06/04/2026